Bruno Retailleau accuses “dogmatic ecology” of preventing farmers from adapting

The LR presidential candidate, Bruno Retailleau, accused “dogmatic ecology” on Thursday of having “prevented” agriculture from adapting to climate change, during a visit to the Livestock Show in Rennes. “I directly accuse this ideology and those who carried it, the ideology of degrowth, a dogmatic, totally militant ecology, which prevented our farmers from adapting to climate change,” he declared to journalists.

According to Bruno Retailleau, “this summer in Brittany, we asked farmers to water cattle with drinking water, quite simply because farmers have been prohibited from storing water for more than 10 years.” “It’s lamentable. These people must be accountable to farmers, to France,” he added. The LR candidate affirmed that he wanted to “encourage the storage of water”, like the measures taken in the last agricultural emergency law, but these works are contested in particular by Environmentalists who see it as a monopolization of the resource for the benefit of a handful of farmers.

“The scandal is not the climate, there is nothing we can do about the climate. But we can at least adapt to the climate,” he continued, promising to remove the precautionary principle “from the Constitution, from the Environmental Charter” because it has become, according to him, “a blocking principle”. Bruno Retailleau also said he wanted to “prohibit through an organic law any overtransposition” of European standards in France. “We are tired of seeing molecules and practices banned from French farmers and ultimately importing them across our borders. What is prohibited in France must also be prohibited in imports. “The best ecology is to produce in France,” assured the Vendée senator.

Concerning fishermen, some of whom have been blocking ports and an oil depot near the Mediterranean since Wednesday, Bruno Retailleau also castigated “the standards”. “While we are restricting our artisanal fishing, which is very high quality fishing, while we are destroying boats, we are letting Chinese boats, in the open sea, factory boats, scrape the seabed of our planet,” he explained.